Sachi Nandan Mohanty (editor) - Decision Making And Problem Solving: A Practical Guide For Applied Research

This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG

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It was always my dream, during my Ph.D. work at IIT Kharagpur, India, to write a book about cognition and decision making under an environment of uncertainty. Day-to-day human life and activities are governed by two major factors, feelings and thoughts, which we more formally name emotions and cognition, respectively. Both these governing factors are considered to be internal happenings and cannot be monitored by anyone else. Decision making under uncertainty is quite a difficult task. Emotion and cognition are the most important functions being carried out in the frontal lobes of the brain, hence predominantly assigned to the problem-solving and decision-making process.

This book consists of seven chapters covering many areas, such as decision making under uncertainty and problem solving, decision making under the environment of multiple criteria, positive people more flexible in cognitive processing, mid-brain connective for human information processing, improving emotional intelligence of employees in an organization for better outcomes, slow and fast thinking for problem solving under uncertainty, and decision making in positive and lastly negative prospects: the influence of certainty and affectivity.

A new development in neuroscience is cognitive neuroscience, which combines the dual approach of understanding human behaviour as symbolic and physiological, according to Simon (1992). Both these approaches are now accepted as normal and natural ways of understanding the underlying cognitive processes in the fields of education and administrative behavioural approaches. Emotion and information processing have expanded interest in cognition as well as in neurological functions in the field of education for facilitating learning and in the field of management for smooth decision making.

The impression of all the chapters in this book covers the diversified domains of cognitive psychology, decision making under uncertainty, in the field of education as well as the management sector. The principal audience for this book is students and researchers who want to consider emotion and cognition as topics for future studies and research. As both topics are widespread and evolving areas of research nowadays, a diversified audience whose curiosity embraces emotion and its practical corollaries is expected.

I owe my heartfelt thanks to all the people who have enabled me to edit this book and all the authors for contributing their chapters. The completion of this undertaking could not have been possible without the participation of the expert reviewers. So, I wish thank the subject matter experts who could find time to review the chapters and deliver those on schedule.

My special thanks to Dr. Suneeta Satpathy, Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science & Engineering, College of Engineering Bhubaneswar, Odihsa, India, for her help with proofreading.

I also express my special thanks and gratitude to Ms. Olivia Ramya Chitranjan and Ms. Lilith Dorko for their dedicated support and help in publishing the book.

Finally, a ton of thanks to Prof. J.P Das, University of Alberta, and Prof. Damodar Suar, Dept. of Humanities and Social Science, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, West Bengal, India for their constant motivation, encouragement, and valuable suggestions as and when needed.

An attempt at any level cannot be satisfactorily completed without the support and guidance of my parents and friends. So here I thank my parents as well as friends for constantly encouraging me to make this book possible.

To end, I am thankful to Lord Krishna who blesses me with sound health and abilities and gives me courage to perform and complete my work in a successful manner.